Founded in 1998, the Alliance for Global Justice (AGJ) is a self-described “anti-capitalist,” “anti-imperialist,” tax-exempt charity whose mission is to train young activists to build a “unified grassroots movement” capable of creating “a socially, ecologically and economically just world” that offers “alternatives” to the “domination of governments, global financial institutions, and multinational corporations which denigrate the world’s peoples and devastate ecosystems.” Central to AGJ's worldview is the belief that “group rights [are] equal to or superior to the rights of individuals articulated by 18th Century European men.”

The Alliance's “struggle for liberation from Empire” focuses on four major areas:

* Economic Justice: AGJ denounces “neoliberal economics,” “corporate globalization,” and “privatization,” contending that “a just society is oriented toward meeting the needs ... of its own people, not toward creating vast inequality and mega-profits for those at the top at the expense of the many.” To combat “the concentration of wealth and power [that] is the root cause of oppression,” says AGJ, there must be a “fundamental change in international and national conditions that disempower people, create [economic and political] disparities, poison the earth, and plunder its resources.” By AGJ's reckoning, it is government's duty to satisfy “the right of people to shelter, sufficient food, medical care, education, employment, [and] leisure,” and to dismantle societal “structures that distribute wealth in ways that deny anyone those basic rights.” A key component of AGJ's Economic Justice initiative is its Campaign for Labor Rights, which promotes the right of workers in the U.S. and abroad to “organize,” “earn a living wage,” and “bargain collectively with their bosses.”

* U.S. Militarism: Asserting that “militarism and modern wars result from coercive force and violent oppression waged in favor of economic and political systems that seek to concentrate wealth, power and resources in the hands of a privileged few,” AGJ charges that “the U.S. war machine” today exists mainly to “guard the interests of transnational corporations via U.S. military dominance around the world.” Supporting “a multi-polar political world and [rejecting] the myth of U.S. exceptionalism and its ambition toward unchallengeable military power,” the Alliance opposes “all U.S. wars and use of U.S. military force abroad”—on grounds that “history has shown that U.S. wars are unjust, exploitative, and profit-driven.” It is significant, however, that AGJ does not categorically reject the use of violence in pursuit of “justice” for “the marginalized and oppressed”—noting proudly, for instance, that its own parent organization, the Nicaragua Network, “was founded to support an armed revolution.”

* Real Democracy: AGJ impugns “electoral processes that give enormous and undue influence to wealthy corporations,” and opposes “all efforts by the U.S. government to subvert other sovereign States through manipulation of their elections, social movements, forced debt, unequal trade treaties and predatory business practices, or military threat.” For example, the Alliance's Respect for Democracy Campaignâ€¨ seeks to shut down the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which in 2004 aided both “the groups that overthrew Haiti’s elected government” and “the coup leaders who unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.” Similarly, AGJ's Venezuela Solidarity Campaignâ€¨ aims to “expose and oppose U.S. government and corporate intervention in Venezuela’s sovereign affairs,” and its Columbia Watch initiative demands “an end to U.S. support for war, repression and neoliberal economics in Colombia.”

* Ecological Integrity: Condemning “the consumptive excesses” and “unrestrained Western consumerism” of “wealthy nations” and “multinational corporations” obsessed with a “constant search for new resources to exploit,” AGJ holds that “global warming is a direct result of this ... drive to put profits before the planet’s own health.” The Alliance's Eco-Solidarity Project warns that America is “putting the rest of the planet in peril” by consuming “some 25% of the world’s energy resources” and producing more solid waste and carbon-dioxide emissions per person than any other country on Earth. “Our war machine and its allies are the biggest sources of ecological destruction on the planet,” laments AGJ, encouraging U.S. leaders to “reverse the economics and politics of war and corporate greed” in order to raise the public's “ecological consciousness.”

Fiercely opposed to the “militarization” of the U.S.-Mexico border,[1] AGJ has also been outspoken on the issue of illegal immigration. “The borderlands,” says the Alliance, “like most of this continent, is primarily a site of displacement and genocide of indigenous people” dating back to the 1840s, when “the U.S. nation state [took] half of México’s land by military force.” Illegal immigrants from Central America, AGJ explains, are commonly “forced north” nowadays by their need to “escape” the poverty that is “a direct result” of U.S. economic and military policies that have: (a) “displaced millions of poor Mexicans from their land,” and (b) “sponsored regimes of terror and genocide ... in order to protect the interests of trade and capitalism.” Proponents of the deportation of illegals, says AGJ, typically seek to manufacture “a public perception that immigrants are freeloaders benefiting from welfare or that they are violent criminals involved in drug trade and gang activity.”

Guiding AGJ's activism are its two co-coordinators: (a) Katherine Hoyt, a longtime activist with the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a Nicaraguan revolutionary Marxist group; and (b) Chuck Kaufman, a veteran Nicaragua Network operative who derides “the culture of U.S. militarism” and helped establish the ANSWER Coalition.